Über-Groupon-Aggregator Dealmap Enters The Fray

Silicon Valley startup Center'd launched The Dealmap, an aggregator for
local deals of all kinds, yesterday.

The Dealmap pulls in deals from close to a hundred Groupon-style
daily deal sites, from location-based services like Foursquare,
from distributors of paper coupons, and elsewhere. In all, the
site claims to have more than 300,000 deals listed.

The local spending space is absolutely exploding, and The Dealmap
is hardly the first attempt at an aggregator -- Yipit and 8Coupons have been around for
months now, and just last week Dealradar followed suit.

But The Dealmap offers some new features that make it worth
watching closely:

As the name suggests, The Dealmap maps out all the deals in
its system, so users can find the deals right around them easily.

The Dealmap incorporates gameplay features, awarding users
points for sharing deals and adding new ones to the database. The
gameplay is nothing too complicated or original, but its a
winning formula.

The Dealmap creates structured data out of all of these
deals, and offers them up to developers through its API.

This last point could be especially important. As location-based
services increasingly find themselves in the same business as
local purchasing startups, pulling in deals from something like
The Dealmap could be a huge boost. Where, which has around 3 million
owned users, and reaches around 50 million through its local ad
network, is already signed up with the API and is now pushing
this deals out to its publishers.

The number of companies working in this space will keep
skyrocketing for the foreseeable future. There probably isn't
room for more than a couple of runaway successes like Groupon,
but the barriers to entry are extremely low, and countless
companies could end up making money on a small scale, creating a
huge opportunity for an aggregator or two.

There are doubtless dozens of aggregators in the production
pipeline now, so it would be crazy to be too confident about any
particular one now, but this is the most promising attempt we've
seen yet.